Paradigm Peptides / Amino Asylum (Matthew Kawa + Jennifer Stechkober)

Matthew Kawa (owner of both Paradigm Peptides and Amino Asylum) and Jennifer Stechkober (Kawa’s sister, also employed at both entities) pleaded guilty in the Northern District of Indiana (Judge Cristal C. Brisco, US District Court, South Bend) to federal charges related to the distribution of unapproved new drugs and the mislabeling of testosterone as SARMs.

Sentencing, July 30, 2026. Kawa, 48, was sentenced to 70 months in prison and agreed to forfeit $5 million in business proceeds. Stechkober, 32, was sentenced to 16 months. Judge Brisco told Kawa he had ignored numerous warnings and left “an incredible trail of harm”, and that he “focused on what you wanted to build instead of thinking about the people”. Prosecutors established that six tested compounds marketed as testosterone alternatives in fact contained testosterone, and that products sold under “research use only” labelling were in fact being sold for human consumption.

This was a multi-brand plea: a single pair of defendants owned and operated two of the larger grey-market peptide brands simultaneously.

Why it still matters: this is the longest custodial sentence in the archive and the clearest signal yet of where the enforcement ceiling sits for a grey-market peptide operator. It also exposed the cross-ownership structure that was common but rarely documented, one operator running multiple customer-facing brands that appeared unrelated on their public websites. And it is the first case in the archive we can follow all the way from raid to sentence: 13 months, June 18, 2025 to July 30, 2026.

Primary sources: DOJ USAO Northern District of Indiana case page for United States v. Matthew Kawa et al.; contemporaneous sentencing report.